Sunday, July 28, 2013

Kingdom of
Heaven is yet another example of the weirdness of current Hollywood. The
film is hugely expensive – it cost well over $100 million. It takes on a
subject that surely ranks nowhere on anyone’s list of surefire popular subject
matter – the 12th century war between Christians and Moslems over
Jerusalem – a subject that seems to carry some particular topical resonance.
It’s an immense technical achievement, with epic recreations of the period and
wonderfully orchestrated battle sequences. And yet at its heart it seems to
flinch from its subject. It consistently rejects complexity in favour of
simplicity. It interprets its characters in blatantly modern terms. It chooses
tired narrative strategies that emphasize trivialities and clichés at the cost
of the wider subject. Scene by scene, it negates the ambition inherent in the
choice of project.

Pulls
you back in...

$100 million movies are sometimes artistically interesting, but
maybe we should view those few examples as pure gravy, and otherwise rid
ourselves of the temptation to view the entire category as other than commerce.
Over the years I find myself writing in this space about “big” movies quite a
bit less than I used to – it just doesn’t seem worthwhile. On the other hand,
if you love movies at all, the mainstream is awfully hard to ignore, and as
Pacino said in The Godfather Part III,
just when you think you’re out, it pulls you back in.

On a recent trip to the UK I visited some relatives who have their
satellite TV switched on basically all day, switching endlessly from one
channel to the other. Most of the stuff is American, or looks like it’s
aspiring to it. My relatives acknowledge most of the stuff is crap, but they
have it on anyway. One day, one of them said that she does the crossword in The Sun (a paper that’s famously even
more divorced from a meaningful concept of “news” than its Toronto equivalent)
because, at home all day, she needs something to stimulate her mind. I couldn’t
bring myself to point out the inadequacy of the Sun crossword for this task, or the copious range of available
alternatives (starting for example with buying a better newspaper). But then,
she knows already. I’ve encountered something similar numerous times among my
(generally intelligent) colleagues – they know on some level that the stuff
they choose to watch or absorb is trivial and unworthy, but their frames of
reference are entirely defined by mainstream media, and it barely occurs to
them that they might break out (the one peculiar exception to this tends to be
film festival week, during which everyone suddenly becomes a connoisseur of the
obscure).

Christians/Moslems

If one viewed Hollywood cinema as a coherent entity, projects like
Kingdom of Heaven would seem like a
strategic play – the enterprising choice of subject serving to demonstrate that
movies as a whole can’t be as limited and pandering as people say, but then with
an execution studiously avoiding setting any real challenges. The film could
potentially have been rather daring in how it presents the Moslems as being
somewhat more temperate and rational than at least a faction of the Christians
(during its making, there were reports that the film threatened to evoke
controversy by being anti-Moslem, but maybe that was merely artful publicity).
But this comes across as no more than political correctness, or else as just a
matter of whim and happenstance. Of course one could debate the film’s version
of events, one could research inaccuracies or odd choices of emphasis. But
what, truly, would be the point?

I realize I may have comprehensively removed what small reason
originally existed for anyone to read to the end of this review, but on the “in
for a penny in for a pound” principle, here are a few more comments anyway. Kingdom of Heaven is directed by Ridley
Scott, and it’s in a similar vein to his big hit Gladiator. At the start, a modest blacksmith played by Orlando
Bloom encounters a knight (Liam Neeson) who announces himself as Bloom’slong lost father. The blacksmith is grieving
his wife’s recent suicide, and perceives an opportunity to redeem her soul by
accepting his father’s invitation to follow him to the Holy Land. Neeson is
killed before he gets there, but instantly on arrival, Bloom establishes
himself as the most charismatic, level-headed man in town. He quickly aligns
himself with the dying Christian King of Jerusalem (played, uncredited and
behind a mask, by Edward Norton) and against a group of Christian
rabble-rousers who blatantly seek to disrupt the workable if fragile peace with
the Moslems who control most of the territory around the city. He also falls
for the wife of one of the main rabble-rousers (played by Eva Green, from
Bertolucci’s The Dreamers), which
helps keep things interesting. The pretty good cast also includes Jeremy Irons
and Brendan Gleeson.

Pros
and Cons

When Bloom arrives in Jerusalem and inherits his father’s lands,
he quickly sets to work on upgrading it with better water and ambiance, looking
like a 60’s commune leader. Is there any historical verisimilitude at all to
that? Who knows, but it’s clear that contemporary identification is the driving
motivation here. The same goes for the frequently irony-laden, edge of flip
dialogue (“It was not that they had no right to take you,” says Neeson after
polishing off a bunch who tried to apprehend Bloom, “it was the way they
asked”) and for the emphasis on personal validation and definition. All of this
makes the film feel profoundly suspect. That would be fine, even admirable, if
this were part of (say) a distancing or dialectic artistic strategy that sought
to tell us something intriguing about our 21st century situation,
but there’s nothing there beyond a bland acknowledgment in the closing titles
that the battles over Jerusalem continue to this day. Even Oliver Stone’s Alexander, a huge failure though that
was, seemed to be grappling more intelligently both with how to identify and
dramatize the truth of its protagonist and to show why that should matter to
any of us now. And although Scott handles digital technology superbly, creating
more authentic looking epic sequences than just about anyone, I still much
prefer the threadbare historical recreations in the work of someone like
Pasolini. Scott’s authenticity is so overwhelming, you never get past the
fakeness of it.

Leaving aside all historical and political references and judging
the film purely as a self-contained drama (as though, like much of Scott’s
earlier work, it were science fiction), it’s moderately engrossing, although
lacking any distinction or sense of discovery. The relationship with Green
seems to carry a potential that’s not realized, and Scott cuts so many
close-ups of the actress into the battle scenes that I started to wonder if the
whole thing was going to be revealed as a fantasy inside her head. Others will
no doubt pick up on things that passed me by. Like a candy store, there’s
enough there for everyone to come away with something, but it’s all dispensable
and nutritionally suspect.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

It’s probably funny how I’ve written about film here
for some sixteen years while only very rarely mentioning television. Several
times a year, I might devote the space to reviewing an HBO movie (in recent
months, Phil Spector and Behind the Candelabra), and I wrote a
few weeks ago about finally catching up with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but that just proves the point, that I’ve only been addressing
television here when it makes stuff that looks like cinema, or at least is a
close cousin to it. Sixteen years ago, I doubt anyone would have questioned the
underlying value judgment: despite real pockets of strength, TV operated under
too many restrictions (of format, budget, standards, everything really) to
generate long-lived equivalents to Scorsese and Coppola and the Coens (for
purposes of this article, I’ll just talk about the U.S. – the relationship has
long been more symbiotic in Europe for instance). But that’s all changed now,
and you can find any number of commentators who believe the quality of American
television has eclipsed that of its films in recent years; indeed, it may be
harder to find people who could convincingly argue the opposite.

TV vs. movies

Well, I’ve recently had to acknowledge to myself that
I watch much more TV than I used to, and maybe for emphasis I should say much much more. This doesn’t mean I’ve
completely let go of my old snobbery, if that’s the word for it. Whereas I
always give movies my undivided attention, allowing no distractions, I
invariably watch TV while doing something else, usually while surveying my
daily roster of Internet sites. Part of this is just practicality – if I didn’t
combine the two activities, I’d run out of time and, well, I’d have to watch
fewer movies (and that would be drastically unacceptable!) But it’s not just
that – in truth, I don’t believe TV shows, even the very best of them, need the
same attention the best movies do. The open-ended nature of the form, the
enforced refilling of the tank, the contingencies of fate and discovery along
the way (most obviously, as the strengths or weaknesses of various actors
suggest or impose different pathways) inevitably entail peaks and troughs – the
beast is too unwieldy to be controlled in the same way as a single film. It’s
not a weakness – much of the fascination lies in the way shows evolve in a way
that couldn’t have been foreseen. But to me it’s like the difference between a
short and a long conversation – it would be rude and probably self-defeating
not to give your full attention to the former, but it’s inevitable that your
attention drifts in and out of the latter.

Dregs of
society

It follows that the TV shows that most challenge my
ability to keep half an eye on the laptop are those conceived as finite
stories, often from the UK – as I write, Secret
State (four episodes in total) and especially The Fall (five episodes) come close to resembling long films that
just happen to have been subdivided into segments. The latter, although
brilliantly executed, points though to another reservation – that if you watch
what’s commonly accepted as the best television, you spend a lot of time with
serial killers, gangsters, and assorted dregs of society (because it’s easier,
I suppose, to keep a long conversation going about demons than angels). The Fall is a chilling example of the serial
killer genre, but it’s still adding to the crazily disproportionate body of
work on such figures. Dexter relies
on turning up a new serial killer every week, but it’s always verged on the
cartoonish, which is part of its transgressive, borderline-goofy charm. I don’t
watch Boardwalk Empire – my wife does
though, so I’ve seen big chunks of it – but it’s always seemed to me somewhat
wearying, what with having to meet its endless atrocity quota.

I’ve been getting increasingly into The Walking Dead, although again, I
don’t like watching swaggering, would-be mythic creations like The Governor,
the villain of the last series; I like the show better when it’s more intimate
and incremental (while acknowledging this wouldn’t be a viable mode for the
long run, but hence the eternal compromises I talked about). Mad Men’s last season seemed to me more
interesting in theory than practice, seemingly unwilling or unable to commit to
any clear direction for its main protagonists, and yet unable to deploy that
uncertainty to illustrate the period as effectively as it used to. The Americans impressed me with some
very deft plotting, although it seems like an unnecessary compression of the
universe to have the CIA agent living across the street from and hanging out
with the undercover spies he’s chasing. The
Newsroom seems as overly-stylized and full of itself to me as it does to
most reviewers, and yet I look forward to it, if only because it’s such a clear
contrast from everything else I mentioned. Under
the Dome is the only show on our current viewing roster that airs on one of
the traditional networks, and illustrates exactly why the networks are in
trouble: it rattles along well enough, but never has a moment that feels
psychologically or emotionally true.

Backlog crisis

We also manage to fit in some comedies, including Girls of course, although I’d swap the
whole series to date for the recent film Frances
Ha. Veep is an irresistible
machine, set in an environment where it doesn’t matter that it’s a rather cold
one. Christopher Guest’s Family Tree,
which just ended, was a distinct disappointment, endlessly slack and padded.
I’m with the pack on this: Louis C.K.’s Louie
rules the genre right now – it’s perhaps the only show on TV where the episode
you just watched gives you no reasonable chance of predicting the content of
the next one. And I hope for a return of the endlessly masterful Curb Your Enthusiasm.

At the time of writing, we haven’t yet been able to
start watching The Bridge or Top of the Lake, and in fact we might be
heading for a backlog crisis. We watched the first episode of Ray Donovan, which was more of an ordeal
than anything else, but not so much that it didn’t deserve a second chance; as
yet though, it never seems like the right night for that. And Breaking Bad, which can lay a claim to
being the most consistently accomplished of the bunch, is only a month or so
away. And then of course there’s my rock, my Grey’s Anatomy. No, actually, I’m joking about that one. Although
now I count up how many shows I just named (and I’m pretty sure I forgot some),
it looks like the joke’s on me. At least I can count my blessings, that things
would be worse if I was hooked on True
Blood and Game of Thrones.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

This is Catherine Breillat from the 2004 film festival program
book: “There are, every time, only two possibilities. Either we talk about it,
try to understand, and abolish; or we respect and live in absolute denial…”
This presumably explains something about Breillat’s rigorous (detractors would
say obsessive and morbid) preoccupation with female sexuality, but of course
cannot explain all of it – we’re defined by the choices we make, and the time
we spend on one battleground means that we decline the battles elsewhere. And
the clearly declining cachet of Breillat’s work (not to mention the subject’s
intractable nature) entails that the warrior gradually appears more neurotic
than brave. Having said all that, I like her films much more than not – her
clinical interest in the mechanics of sexual politics regularly generates
shockingly memorable sequences.

The
Last Mistress

Her previous film Anatomy of
Hell, even so, didn't break much new ground, and shortly afterwards she
suffered a stroke. She made her latest, Une
vieille maitresse (released here as The
Last Mistress) after recovering, but reportedly suffered another stroke
since then. Unusually for her, it’s a costume drama, set among the French
aristocracy, where Ryno de Marigny, a young man with a reputation as a
libertine, is engaged to be married. To set her grandmother’s mind at ease, he
tells her everything about his mistress of ten years, a headstrong Spaniard,
Vellini; he admits their mutual obsession, but assures her it’s now over, and
the marriage proceeds.

Blood was a prominent motif in Anatomy
of Hell – although there it was specifically menstrual blood, rendering the
film often more medical than erotic. The only true path, it posited, is to
embrace what’s disgusting in womanhood. She asks if she should have shaved her
armpits; he says there would be no point, for the skin would still be as bumpy
and repellent, like a frog (“except that at least frogs have the decency to be
green”). “The lie about the softness of women,” he says, “is hateful.”

Asia Argento’s recent career might be devoted to obliterating that
hateful lie, and she’s perfectly cast as Vellini. At times she seems to dial up
the patented Kubrick stare from A
Clockwork Orange and other films – making herself strange, unknowable,
frightening, mesmerizing. De Marigny at first sight calls Vellini “an ugly
mutt” (no one defies the categories of beauty and ugliness like Argento) which
she overhears – the more she hates him, the more he pursues her. In an early
costume ball she says she’s dressed as “the Devil himself,” and her Spanish
“otherness” is flamboyantly coded through clothing that looks like a
fetishistic message board compared to the stiffness of the prevailing female
dress.

De Marigny’s persistence leads to a duel with her elderly husband;
he’s shot but survives, and as the doctor treats his wound she enters the room
to lick up his blood – which the doctor disgustedly says will prolong his
infection. The next scene starts with an apparently unsimulated scene of a chicken
being cut by the throat (it ain’t always subtle). The tone of their
relationship is set - the evocation of vampirism sums up the interplay of
submission and possession. A similar dynamic will recur throughout the film.

Jacques
Rivette

It makes for a gripping, fascinating story. The film’s historical
recreation appears attentive enough, but precise fidelity never seems like
Breillat’s primary concern (several reviewers pointed out how the very modern
tattoo on Argento’s back is visible in at least one scene).On the Chicago
Reader blog, Pat Graham pointed out the general resemblance to Jacques
Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais,
which played here a few months ago, and put it this way: “Whatever her merits
as historian, Breillat's micromanaged attraction to the vagaries of human
passion invites a complicity that Rivette, more austere and abstract, isn't
inclined to give. On the other hand, Duchess
fascinates out of sheer obliquity, its terse, alienating distance—everything
less predictable since less familiar, a matter of epistemological cunning
rather than identification strategies unleashed. Yet despite its raw immediacy,
it's the Breillat that arguably wears you down and out.” (I know – Graham’s
writing always has that “huh?” aspect to it).

Rivette is one of my very favourite directors, but I wrote here
that Duchess struck me
as “second-tier Rivette,” lacking the classic elements of his “unique cinematic
universe.” I haven’t yet seen the film for a second time, but I’m fairly sure
that when I do, I’ll start to see my reaction was constrained by
preconceptions. The apparent new direction of Une vieille maitresse, conversely, had me approaching the film with
a quite open mind, but in the end it certainly feels like watching a Breillat
picture – which, as I say, is just fine with me.

It follows that there could never be a tidy ending to this battle.
If de Marigny and Vellini don’t literally obliterate each other, the film
almost metaphorically presents it that way, letting someone else have the last
word on them. Society can accommodate – indeed, could hardly function without –
scandals and transgressions; what it ultimately means to the participants
though, we can only guess. By leaving the possibilities somewhat open, Breillat
provides what might actually be, by her fearful standards, an upbeat happy
ending.

Gonzo

Gonzo: The
Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, is an
interesting enough documentary on the legendary journalist, who killed himself
a few years ago. I’ve never read much of Thompson, and can’t decide after the
movie whether I want to make the effort – one commentator describes his
reporting as a blend of scrupulous accuracy and complete fantasy. The movie
gives us snippets - read by Johnny Depp (who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) – but
spends more time on anecdotage, often very diverting. On the other hand, if the
portrait of Thompson is as unimaginative as the soundtrack musical collection,
then we’re not unearthing much at all. Director Alex Gibney did a great job
(and won an Oscar) on setting out some Bush administration outrages in Taxi From The Dark Side, and seems to
have taken on the Thompson project specifically as a lighter contrast, which
may not have been for the greater good.

The movie doesn’t try to analyze his legacy, beyond a few token
judgments that we could use Thompson nowadays (cue picture of George W); my
best guess is he provided some genuine inspiration, but on the other hand his
open fixations for or against various individuals, and his increasing immersion
in his own distinctive persona, might establish him as a fairly clear
forerunner of today’s bloated celebrity opinionators. But Gibney’s film doesn’t
come close to providing clarity on that.

Cinema is full of stories of reversals of fortune, but
not many as jarringly extreme and sudden as Michael Cimino’s. In 1978, not yet
forty, he won the best picture and director Oscars for the Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter, only his second film
(his first was Clint Eastwood’s Thunderbolt
and Lightfoot). On the basis of its huge success, he obtained backing for
an even more ambitious project, the western Heaven’s
Gate, which went way over budget, and ended up losing all of it. Almost no
American critics liked the film (although many of them only saw it in a
butchered version), and the stories of Cimino’s excesses made him almost
unemployable, especially after a very entertaining and high-profile book by one
of the studio executives, Final Cut, charted
the whole messy history (Cimino derides the book as a work of fiction). He
didn’t work for five years after that, and hasn’t made anything at all since
1996 (except for a short film, part of an anthology, lasting just a couple of
minutes). In a recent interview, he summed up his status as follows: “Being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird kind of
occupation in and of itself.”

The Deer Hunter

Heaven’s Gate was always better received abroad, and by now it’s
much more highly regarded at home too, recently receiving what almost
constitutes a form of “official recognition” via a release of a
restored-version DVD on the Criterion label. Ironically, it probably gets more
attention now than The Deer Hunter –
put crudely, it seems to me that film’s status was retrospectively downgraded
in the light of the mass hatred for Heaven’s
Gate, although not to the point where it might itself become a candidate
for reclamation. I recently rewatched both films in quick succession (an
investment of some six and a half hours) and found it a remarkably complex
enterprise,

The Deer Hunter starts off in an industrial Pennsylvania town, on a
day when one of a group of friends gets married, on the eve of shipping out to
Vietnam with two of his buddies. One of them makes it back more or less intact;
one loses his legs; the third goes missing, but the first later goes back to
find him. One of the film’s central oppositions is between the deer hunting of
the title, a self-aggrandizing, ritualized enterprise constructed around the
ideal of bringing down the quarry in one shot, and the famous Russian roulette
sequences in Vietnam, where the emphasis on the one shot constitutes an apex of
human degradation and incoherence. The film doesn’t spend even token time on
the war’s putative purpose or conduct, presenting it as little more than a sick
mess, the effect of which further draws out and strangifies the fractures that
always existed on the home front. In the last scene, the assembled group sings God Bless America, evading any easy
reading – not with sarcasm or utter hopelessness, nor with blind patriotism:
like much in the film, it’s a scene that seems to tempt us into a more
superficial reading, based on our preconceptions and impulses, than it’s
actually capable of supporting.

Robin Wood

The
film has the feeling of grappling with a subject of almost impossible
immensity, of trying to find a structure and a mode of expression equal to the
sadness of its subject. The best analysis of the film that I know of, by Robin
Wood in his book Hollywood from Vietnam
to Reagan…and Beyond, disentangles its complex strands with surgical
clarity, while allowing that the scalpels can only reach so far: he concludes
that the film’s greatness perhaps lies “in the richness of its confusions.”
Among many other things, Wood’s essay is masterful in drawing out an element
which I’d registered, but hardly mulled on in such detail – the way in which
its treatment of the three main characters played by Robert De Niro,
Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep expresses “the universal bisexuality our
culture strives to repress.” Reading Wood’s account, and mulling on the sly
radicalism of Cimino’s achievement, it seems plausible there was something
primal in how the world soon turned on him, seizing an opportunity to quell
some unresolved anxiety in what he represented.

I’d
watched The Godfather again a few
weeks before rewatching The Deer Hunter,
and while that remains a staggering feat of story-telling, and much more
obviously influential on American storytelling in recent decades, it seemed
almost limited and self-absorbed by comparison (Wood seems to have little time
for Coppola, judging his work “a daunting mixture of the pretentious and the
banal, in roughly equal measure,” with the Godfather
films constituting “only partial” exceptions). The Godfather remains tremendously provocative about the nature of
post-war America, but only insofar as we choose to regard the somewhat rarified
trajectory of the Corleones as an experience with inherent metaphorical
resonance (there’s virtually nothing of what you might call “the real world” in
the film). Compared to that film’s impeccable sense of assurance, The Deer Hunter preaches and rambles and
occasionally seems to lose its thread altogether, but while it draws on American
myths and archetypes, it obsessively bores in on one of America’s thousands of
culturally specific environments (marked in this case by the steel mills that
dominate the town, and by the fraying Russian immigrant heritage), yet
universally struggling and unfulfilled. On the other hand, Cimino was never a
documentarian – as my wife pointed out, the deer hunting scenes, supposedly
taking place above their Pennsylvania town, were actually shot half a continent
away.

Heaven’s Gate

Wood
rates Heaven’s Gate even more highly
than The Deer Hunter, placing it
“among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema.” Set in the 1890’s, it
depicts how a group of establishment Wyoming landowners (acting outside the
law, but with the tacit support of authorities and institutions) launch what we
might now almost call a campaign of ethnic cleansing against a “death list” of
immigrants; Kris Kristofferson plays a marshal, an establishment man himself,
but disgusted by these actions. More than the previous film, Heaven’s Gate is marked by its extreme
visual beauty, but not of a glassily pictorial kind – there’s a slight
gauziness to many of the images, so that the film and its meaning often seem to
be dissolving away from us. Of course, respondents often analyzed this quality,
along with Cimino’s discursive approach to narrative and relationships (if one
wasn’t sure about the politicized sexuality of The Deer Hunter, it becomes even clearer in Heaven’s Gate), as denoting simple ineptitude. But in a way, they
only confirmed one of his core points, that American ideals, almost as soon as
they were articulated and formalized, have always been in the process of
degrading and dying. If I found Heaven’s
Gate slightly less stimulating than The
Deer Hunter on this occasion anyway, maybe it’s only because I’ve never
been particularly dazzled by America’s claims for its past, whereas we have no
choice but to be invested in its present.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

This is the eighth
and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film
Festival.

Summer Palace (Lou Ye)

The Chinese authorities recently
banned director Lou from making films in China for five years, after he took
this film to Cannes without the proper approvals. Presumably this was
substantively motivated by its depiction of Beijing University in the late 80’s
as a morass of volatility and sexuality, with not an ideological precept in
sight: it also includes a (somewhat murky) depiction of Tiananmen Square. But
the film certainly won’t seem very provocative to Western eyes. The first half,
based around a rural girl who attends the university and goes wild, before
dropping out in the wake of a busted love affair – is diverting but never as
probing or acute as one wishes for, and then the second half, following the two
ex-lovers in their divergent paths through life for the next fifteen years,
eventually comes to seem like little more than soap opera. The programme book
calls the film’s style “oblique,” but actually it’s all too comprehensible –
the attempts to mirror internal and external states come across as laboured.
With no particular finesse of technique overall, the movie is unfortunately more
interesting in theory than in practice, although the theory does count for a
lot here.

Renaissance (Christian Volckman)

I don’t have any
specific interest in animation, nor in the science-fantasy genre, so a film
combining both held no particular appeal for me. But sometimes you go with what
fits the time slot. Renaissance
certainly has a distinctive technique – it’s composed almost entirely of pure
black and pure white, eschewing shadings, so that foregrounds and backgrounds
can often be distinguished only through evocations of shadows and movement.
It’s impressive, for example, how much facial expression can be evoked through
the movement of four blobs of black. The problem is that the main aesthetic
takeaway is pretty well established after ten minutes, and so it all comes down
to the story, which is a humdrum concoction in the vein of Blade Runner and many others. It’s Paris in 2030, a young female
scientist has disappeared, and a hard-bitten cop searches for her, with a
sinister corporation lurking in the background. The film’s conception of the
future isn’t particularly distinctive or detailed, and whereas animation used
to carry the constant advantage of pulling off spectacles that couldn’t be
achieved otherwise, digital technology has narrowed that gap considerably. So
the movie basically didn't feel that necessary to me.

You could use up
your word quota just listing the directors and principal cast on this one, a
collection of 18 vignettes set in various areas of the City of Love. This was
the last film I saw at the festival this year, and since I was seriously
flagging by then, it was a just about perfect stopping point, delivering
goodwill and a vague sense of upper-middlebrow activity (hard to feel you’re
slumming it when all those auteur names keep popping on and off the screen)
without making any serious demands on the audience. Most of the segments are
just pleasant baubles. Alfonso Cuaron’s is, strangely, the dullest and least
inspired. Christopher Doyle’s is the giddiest and most boundary pushing. The
Coens deliver a very proficient metro nightmare. Gerard Depardieu recruits Ben
Gazzara and Gena Rowlands for a Cassavetes reunion, but then fails to think of
anything interesting for them to say. Olivier Assayas’ story of an American
actress and a drug pusher is one of the few segments that might productively be
stretched out to greater length. Tom Tykwer’s segment, with Natalie Portman, is
certainly the most hardworking. But nothing in the movie will persist as more
than the slightest footnote in its creator’s biography.

And then I saw
this one later on in its commercial release:

Infamous (Douglas McGrath)

This is the
unfortunate film covering almost exactly the same ground as last year’s Capote – Truman Capote’s researching and
writing In Cold Blood, in particular
his relationship with one of the convicted killers - and since Capote scooped up enough attention for
five average films, there was never going to be much left over for Infamous. It’s almost impossible to
write about it on its own terms, so here it is: it’s more or less the same
length as the first film, but spends much more time on his celebrity friends
and less in charting the precise impact on Capote’s artistic soul; Toby Jones
may be a closer physical match than Philip Seymour Hoffman, but is also less
charismatic and nuanced; the casting is blander all the way along the line; the
storytelling has much less finesse here, often relying on talking heads to
deliver key information or interpretation. I have to admit that I never quite
understood why Capote was so highly
valued, and found that film heavy going at times for all its strengths, so in a
certain lesser way it was actually more fun watching the glossier Infamous and ticking off similarities
and differences. But truly, this film’s only place in history, along with the
likes of Milos Forman’s Valmont, will
be to surface every five years or so in articles about strange movie
coincidences.

And that’s it for
this year’s festival. Many writers found this a bit of an off year. The opening
gala left many people cold, the most heralded premieres (The Fountain, A Good Year, All the King’s Men) frequently fell a
little flat and there was a lack of real breakthrough discoveries: the People’s
Choice went to a movie called Bella,
about which I barely heard a word before, during or after the festival. Several
writers even criticized the caliber of the visiting celebrities, or maybe it’s
more that they failed to do anything sufficiently splashy once they got here
(Sean Penn’s famous cigarette aside). I never know to what degree the quality
of the films I saw can stand as a representative sample, so I can only say that
I enjoyed most of them, although I did feel a little deprived of
near-masterpieces. The two films I liked most were probably Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Alain
Resnais’ Coeurs, and in truth there’s
probably a bit of a gap between those two and whatever it is that might take my
bronze medal.

I mentioned above
how I was flagging, and it’s true – I actually seriously (well, semi-seriously)
considered dropping out before the end. On two occasions in the last two days,
I actually went to the wrong theatre, which tells you a lot about how my
faculties were becoming undone. Is this the beginning of the end for your
indefatigable reviewer? Only time will tell!

I’d never try to argue that human innovation and achievement
has run out, but it does sometimes feel as if its capacity for meaningful
public discourse has hit the wall. Politics has never been so trivial;
substance has never been so crowded out by trivia and ephemera; it seems
unthinkable that we might ever conduct an even vaguely balanced mass
conversation about our long-term needs and how to get there. Rick Salutin
pointed out in The Star last week
that even bedrock terms like “democracy” have become degraded, essentially used
merely as a synonym for “elections,” regardless that those elections may be
rendered all but meaningless by the lies told at the time, or by subsequent
lack of faith. It’s a better way to go, argued Salutin counseled, if “you don’t
assume the definition of democracy or human progress has reached any fixed end
points. Most cultural activity only really began 8,000 to 12,000 years ago, as
a teenager recently told me; it would be odd to assume anything is complete. In
that light, it’s we who should uncouple from fixed definitions and learn
something from their openness.”

The Bling Ring

This might not seem like the most
obvious way into Sofia Coppola’s new film The
Bling Ring, based on the real life story from a few years ago about a group
of teenagers who got into burglarizing celebrity homes, taking off with several
million dollars in stuff. But I think the film’s main interest is in its
implicit challenge to governing concepts – morality, the “rule of law,”
property rights; it suggests their underpinning has become (at least in certain
quadrants of America) so distorted and degraded that it’s increasingly unclear
what they’re meant to safeguard. The kids in The Bling Ring might well be largely “uncoupled from fixed definitions” – the
trouble is, instead of this being a path to enlightenment, it strands them in
mind-boggling narcissism and idiocy.

The narrative gets under way as Marc, a
vaguely troubled kid of no great distinction, arrives at a new school, where he
instantly falls in with Rebecca, one of the hot girls. In a few minutes of
screen time, she’s leading him outside from a party to check out the parked
cars, finding a good percentage of them unlocked and containing spoils. They
progress into rifling empty houses, first the homes of no-names and then (aided
by Google as a supplier both of addresses and of information on who’s out of
town at any given moment) of the rich and famous, their favourite target being
Paris Hilton’s, which they hit up as you or I might visit a local Starbucks
(the premise, reasonable from what we see of the house, is that she has so much
stuff, she’d never miss any of it as long as they keep the nightly haul no
greater than, say, a small truckload). Of course, it’s a bubble that inevitably
bursts.

Taking from Paris

Their targets, like Hilton, all belong
to that category where the source of their fame and wealth is either unknown,
or else seems grossly disproportionate to their actual achievements, and Paris’
pad in particular resembles a department store cum nightclub cum Museum of
Paris Hilton more than a place where anyone might feel at home. Of course, there’s not much new to be said about such
excesses, and yet Coppola manages it, by conveying just how little any of these
trappings matter, how they constitute an existential black hole of meaning. As
the film presents it, the security at these buildings is shockingly lax, far
more so than it would be for a “normal” person, who actually cared about their
space and what it contained. The kids seem not to perceive their actions as
stealing, and how could they, when what they’re taking wasn’t “earned” by any
rational measure of functioning capitalism, doesn’t seem to fundamentally
matter to its notional owners, and has little inherent value relative to its
ticket price (it’s hard to imagine them wearing or using anything they steal
much more than once). When they’re caught, they barely seem to relate to the
development as other than a practical problem, which for at least one of them
might as much constitute a public relations opportunity (Lindsay Lohan’s jail
time gets cited several times). A shot near the end of Marc being led along in
an orange jumpsuit, followed and preceded by serious-looking convicts with the
kind of bodies and ambiance appearing nowhere else in the movie, emphasizes how
little any of this has to do with broader societal notions and impacts of
crime.

It’s not that Coppola defends her
subjects as such, but that she seems to regard them as beyond defense or
criticism, as embodiments of a complete moral absence. Writing in the British Observer, Catherine Shoard called the
film “a Tinseltown stitch-up that exonerates all
involved by understanding the plight of the crimes in terms of simple celeb
worship (and) actually acts as yet another ad. By reiterating the desirability
of starry clobber, Coppola is pushing positive brand reinforcement.” She adds:
“Coppola's dialogue is remorselessly authentic in its inanity, and this
blankness runs deep in what finally feels a shallow film about shallow people.”
Many other reviewers saw the film in broadly similar terms, and it’s not hard
to see where they’re coming from. But the depth of the blankness seems like the
point – any kind of imposed intelligence or analytical distance would be untrue
to the all-consuming absence of those qualities. If the film was going to be
made at all, it could only be as an artfully shallow one.

A better life?

You might
fairly argue though that the film didn’t
need to be made, that Coppola is mining to exhaustion a narrow seam of
material. Writing here about her last film Somewhere,
an examination of a star actor, I said it raised such questions as “if someone like Johnny Marco
isn’t living a better life than the average slacker, then what’s the point of it
all; in particular, what’s the nature of the attention directed at him, the
desire to be close to him?” and “we can find meaning in such lives if we look
for it, but why are we bothering?” These may not be exactly the same questions
as those raised by The Bling Ring,
but they don’t seem a million miles removed from them either. Still, Coppola is
skillful enough that it continues to seem like a useful line of investigation,
even if the inner layerings of Hollywood can only stretch so far in
illustrating broader issues.

I quoted Shoard as calling the film an “exoneration,” but it
would be a complex task to consider whether America retains enough intellectual
and ethical coherence to convict or exonerate anyone of much of anything; it’s
a country that seems fixed where it ought to be open, and vice versa. I don’t
think it’s quite at the point where Paris Hilton’s closet is a more meaningful
institution than, say, Congress, but it might be getting there fast.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

This is the
seventh of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film
Festival.

Red Road (Andrea Arnold)

This is Arnold’s
first feature length picture (although she won an Oscar in 2003 for best live action
short film) and took the special jury prize at Cannes last May. That award is
easy to understand, for this is an expertly constructed drama, almost
unbearably intense at times, and provocative about issues of morality and
justice, especially in a surveillance society that reduces the physical and
figurative ability to hide. It’s built around a Glasgow woman who monitors the
network of security cameras trained on a rough part of the city; she recognizes
a man just released from prison, starts to monitor him obsessively, and then
gradually to inject herself into his life. There are some similarities with
films like Vertigo and Blow-Up in how a desire we can only
partly understand is driven by a compulsion to watch and to influence, but the
precise contemporary milieu makes Arnold’s film distinctive and disturbing.
Both lead actors are excellent, sustaining a strong feeling of pending
violence. The film’s overall shape, once revealed, might be seen as a little
too contrived (although very clever) and it certainly works too hard at
providing a final feeling of closure. Still, it’s hard to imagine how a debut
film could be much more assured.

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley)

For a while I
thought the laconic Hartley might be one of the best directors of his time,
although with hindsight he may always have been playing to the downtown crowd. Henry Fool was a distinct high, but
since then his work has seemed tapped out. So back to something that worked at
the time, with this sequel to Henry –
Parker Posey’s suburban housewife (the wife Henry left behind at the end of the
previous film) is suddenly catapulted into international espionage when her
vanished husband’s rambling journals turn out to be currency in a terrorist
plot. Well, it doesn’t work any more. Hartley’s patented technique, somewhere
between cool and stunted, seems now less calculated than merely limited. The
film, dense in exposition, codes, double-crosses and jumbled motivations, no
doubt parodies the genre and the new imperative of “connecting the dots” against
terrorism, but when carried out at such length and artificiality, parody is
barely distinguishable from a pallid stab at the real thing. And the obsession
with the earlier film’s entrails (presumably barely remembered now even by
those of us who liked it) speaks merely of expired inspiration. If I hadn’t
sadly suspected it might turn out this way, then this would have been my
biggest disappointment of the festival.

Flandres (Bruno Dumont)

Dumont has a
tenuous following at best – Humanite
caused a bit of a scandal when it won several major prizes at Cannes, and his
next film Twenty-Nine Palms was
mostly seen as silly and tawdry. Personally I was highly susceptible to Humanite’s metaphysics and committed
weirdness (it made my DVD-purchase grade, and I can’t say more than that), but
there’s no question that Dumont is an egoist with an occasional lack of grace
and limited preoccupations. Flandres
exhibits his usual failings, and yet it seems imbued with a more
straightforward sense of humanity, even sentimentality, rendering it rather
more accessible and perhaps straightforwardly likeable. The film starts among a
group of French farmers who are going off to an unspecified war (the details
are intriguingly anachronistic), and a local girl who sleeps with two of them;
later we follow the men through the brutal conflict, while the girl finds
herself pregnant and is hospitalized. Dumont sees both home and war fronts as
barely better than primitive; flesh and churned earth and blood and dying and
living are all elements in some desolate recipe (although this approach makes
for a compelling depiction of war), and yet he implies that something
transcendent lies close to the core of all this. It’s an easy film to
criticize, but I must admit I found it oddly impactful.

L’Intouchable (Benoit Jacquot)

Jacquot has been,
rather inexplicably, a film festival favourite, subject of a spotlight
retrospective in 1997 and now designated as a “Master,” although I’m not sure
even discerning filmgoers really think of him as such. His last film A tout de suite was highly engaging
though, indicating the possibility of a new, more discursive direction. L’Intouchable has the same loose feel as
that movie, but is much slighter. A young actress travels to India to find the
father she’s never met, and in the course of the journey acquires a certain
amount of spiritual self-definition. Jacquot’s muse from A tout de suite, Isild Le Besco, again plays the protagonist here,
and it’s not difficult to understand her appeal for him – not a classic beauty,
she nevertheless suggests considerable sensuality and complexity, generating maximal
affect from minimal apparent input. She seems to embody the loosening of
Jacquot’s technique and the apparent dissipation of his interest in plot and
structure. But I’m not sure there’s much more to this film than the concept
“Isild goes to India.” It effectively captures some Indian vignettes and gently
conveys her acquisition of greater serenity, but the film strikes me as a
substantially blank canvas. A Master, I think, would demand more of himself,
and of us.

And I saw this
next one on its subsequent commercial release:

The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald)

Macdonald’s first
fiction film (after documentaries including Touching
The Void) is an intensely vivid dramatization of Ugandan Idi Amin’s decline
from apparent liberator to outright murdering despot, as seen through the eyes
of a young Scotsman who flukily becomes his personal physician. If you’ve ever
seen a Western-made film about Africa, that synopsis already gives you the flaw
– this is yet another film in which we concentrate on the narrow moral dilemmas
and hazards of a single white protagonist, while the suffering of the
multitudes passes mostly unseen in the background (the underappreciated Shooting Dogs, which quickly came and
went a few months ago, was relatively more effective in pushing home the full
extent of what happened in Rwanda). Forest Whitaker (in a performance that’s
mentioned as an Oscar possibility) is effective enough at capturing the
extremes of Amin’s personality, but the scenes that might make the portrayal
truly illustrative simply haven’t been provided to him. Ultimately, the film
merely becomes annoyingly contrived and sketchy. For all its obvious flaws,
it’s saturated with atmosphere and dread, and hardly allows a dull moment, and
given how the Amin regime already counts as distant history under the weight of
so many subsequent cataclysms, it’s a useful contribution to future History
Channel archives.

I know I’ve
quoted it here before, but one of my favourite lines of film criticism is David
Thomson’s comment about Howard Hawks, that it’s the principle of Hawks’ cinema
“that men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.” He
goes on to say “that Hawks attends to such small things because he is the
greatest optimist that the cinema has produced,” and that “the optimism comes
out of a knowledge of failure and is based on the virtues and warmth in people that
go hand-in-hand with their shortcomings.” Depending on your view of cinema, or
of Hawks, you might not think that sounds like much, at least not compared to
saving the world, and indeed it doesn’t, if you value “spectacle” and “escaping
from your troubles” and the other heavy-welded components of the Hollywood
brand above all other considerations. But is there a greater form of pessimism,
I wonder, than submitting to an endless stream of coldly peril-ridden
mythologies?

Frances Ha

Thomson’s line
came back to me as I watched Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, one of the year’s most optimistic films – in the sense
laid out above – and one of its most enchanting. Broader similarities with
Hawks might not be self-evident, although it does provoke the thought that
modern-day New York as occupied by young “arty” types – the territory of Lena
Dunham’s Girls (with which the film
shares a key cast member) and of a thousand low-budget movies – might now
constitute a sort of genre framework in the way that westerns and private eyes
once did. That is, whether or not what we’re watching is particularly
representative of any documentable reality, it provides a wonderfully fertile
framework in which to plot human interactions. I like Girls very much, but Baumbach’s work in Frances Ha is so subtle and skillful, it almost makes that show,
and his own previous work, look heavy-handed (it also solidifies my
reservations about Richard Linklater’s Before
Midnight, which I wrote about here two weeks ago).

Much
of the credit certainly belongs to the lead actress Greta Gerwig, who wrote the
film with Baumbach, and somewhere into the line entered into a much-covered
relationship with him. Her Frances is 27 years old, poor, but as a friend
points out, not really poor – although her actual income may be minimal, the
supplementary momentum of favours, borrowed apartments, maxed-out credit cards
and so forth still has a while to run. As the film begins, she’s sharing an
apartment with her best friend Sophie, delighting in the easy familiarity of
their relationship, and imagining it might continue indefinitely. But Sophie
suddenly moves out, and then acquires a serious boyfriend, and her life heads
off on a trajectory which threatens to exclude Frances altogether; Frances
falters personally, and professionally (she’s trying to make it as a dancer),
and enters what seems capable of becoming a serious downward spiral.

Weekend in Paris

The
film proceeds through a gentle, often almost subliminal series of displacements
and shifts, of mood and relationships and emotional structures. Its
centerpiece, perhaps, is Frances’ weekend in Paris – a wickedly disastrous
experience, so beautifully rendered it could constitute a short film in itself,
while avoiding all sense of a calculated set-piece (even though it is that). But
throughout, Baumbach avoids the over-emphatic rhythms that often mark even
better films. Writing about a central dinner scene in Before Midnight, I noted how “the dialogue is all nicely spaced and distributed, with none of
the digressions and dead zones of real social intercourse: everyone talks
entirely in comic or metaphysical zingers (or both).” Baumbach may well have
been subject to similar limitations in the past, but seldom here.

For another point
of reference, Frances Ha has a dinner
scene too, where Frances bemuses her hosts with her incoherent digressions. As
I saw it during the weekend when The Heat
was the number one film, I couldn’t help thinking how such a scene would play
out in a Melissa McCarthy film, the prevailing mood shattered by imaginative
obscenities and knowingly grotesque sexual innuendos. It might be funny, but it
wouldn’t reveal a thing about character, and could never allow the scene’s
surprising conclusion, where Frances suddenly shifts into an oddly beautiful
reverie about love, all but taking away the breath of her previously skeptical
hosts. Her imagery in that scene sets up a key moment toward the end, in a way
that supports a theme of growth and adaptation – Frances achieves, if only in
passing, her romantic dream, but in a context, and bearing a meaning, more
tempered and complex than she could previously have imagined.

In addition to
the trip to Paris, the film has numerous references to the French new wave, and
to Francois Truffaut in particular – we glimpse a poster for one of his films,
and his key actor Jean-Pierre Leaud gets a mention; Baumbach shoots it all in
gorgeous black and white (which also brings some of Woody Allen’s peak-period
comedies to mind at times). I don’t know whether Baumbach finds these links a
specific source of artistic strength, but if nothing else they place Frances Ha in a tradition of eternally
provocative and fulfilling cinema, created out of relative poverty of means,
ventilated by a rejection of deadening conventions.

Classic Gerwig

Part of that
tradition was always its greater sexual frankness, but funnily enough, Baumbach
keeps things remarkably decorous in that respect: there’s a certain amount of
sex, but no hint of any on screen – indeed, this absence (and the accompanying
suggestion that Frances may be fundamentally undateable) is key to the film’s
effect. Although it’s certainly a contemporary movie, there’s something rather
out-of-time to this courtliness (judged as anthropology, it might be a flaw
that smartphones aren’t as prominent as they should be, not that they’re
absent), which adds to that sense of genre filmmaking, ably weaving reality and
myth.

The film, then,
seems to me a considerable delight, and confirms all the buzz about Gerwig as
the truest heir to classic Hollywood – only a moderate beauty by magazine cover
standards, but with a beyond-beguiling resourcefulness that might cause you to
redefine your standards in such things. Frances
Ha ought to be the talk of this supposedly film-loving city, but when I
went with my wife to see it at 5 pm on the second Sunday of its release, there
were only three other people in the place. The number one picture, as I
mentioned, was The Heat, which at
least by all accounts isn’t a film about saving the world, but nevertheless may
constitute another step closer to destroying it, culturally speaking. What can
you do, except close with an ambiguous ha?

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).